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Monday, October 9, 2017

Rebuilding After the Hurricanes: These Solar Modular Homes Use Almost No Energy

This was shared with us by a Net Zero/High Performance modular home builder

An article about modular housing from Inside Climate News

The scope of the damage to mobile home parks and older neighborhoods along America's hurricane-ravaged coasts is enormous. More than 15,500 homes were destroyed in Texas alone, and the count hasn't even begun in Puerto Rico or the Virgin Islands.

A Vermod modular Net Zero home on the production line

The homeowners who plan to stay face a choice: They can rebuild what they had before, knowing the warming climate will bring more devastating storms, or they can build for energy efficiency and resilience. The decision often comes down to cost, but an innovative type of post-disaster construction is creating new options.In the Asheville, North Carolina, offices of Deltec Homes—one of several builders of prefabricated, energy efficient houses—the phones have been ringing insistently with questions about the hurricane-resistant, net-zero-energy homes the company manufactures and ships around the world. The homes are designed to reduce energy loss and are built ready for solar panels to allow customers to go off-grid and still power up when the grid goes down in a storm.The company has seen a rise in interest in the past month, from the Virgin Islands and the Florida Keys in particular, company President Steve Linton said. "It's an insane jump," he said.Nearly a decade ago, net-zero-energy homes were rare, usually custom-built for wealthy homeowners who wanted to incorporate energy efficient appliances and rooftop solar panels. Now, that's starting to shift: within the last year, the zero-energy home market has grown 33 percent, said Shilpa Sankaran, executive director of the Net-Zero Energy Coalition."That's a tiny fraction of new home construction, but in terms of growth, we're seeing the kind of numbers solar saw in its early days in 2011 and 2012," she said.For that market to really take off, net-zero homes have to become cheaper—particularly in low-income communities, which are disproportionately affected by extreme weather. That's a challenge companies like Deltec are trying to meet by designing modular, prefabricated, net-zero homes that reduce energy usage, cut costs and can withstand extreme weather and power outages.